


if you leave (i'll be lost)

by happyberry



Category: Chernobyl (TV 2019)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Closeted Character, Hand Jobs, M/M, Oral Sex, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2020-04-24 09:36:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19170595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/happyberry/pseuds/happyberry
Summary: “Oh, Valera," Boris says. "What are we going to do with you?”In the months leading up to the trial, Valery asks Boris to stay.





	if you leave (i'll be lost)

**Author's Note:**

> quick warning for suicidal ideation/reference to a previous attempt.

Moscow has always felt more lonely to Valery than anywhere else in the world. No one looks you in the eye here, not even the man who sells cigarettes down the street. Not even the woman who pours vodka at the bar he’s trying not to frequent.

He watches Sasha sit on the windowsill and, not for the first time, finds himself envying her simple-mindedness—her ability to need little more than the sun to feel warm. She’s an affectionate animal, but not a needy one and Valery sometimes wonders if she knows something he doesn’t.

Probably, he thinks, she does.

When the knock on his door comes, he snubs out his cigarette and runs a hand down the front of his shirt, wishing he’d thought to wear a tie. Too late for that now, far too late.

Boris is a force to be reckoned with as always, talking before he’s even through the doorway, dressed all in black and carrying a briefcase.

“Khomyuk says it was _your_ idea that I be the one to explain how the nuclear reactor works,” he’s saying, peering into this room and then that one as if looking to see who else is there. Like Valery is hiding some errant officer in the spare bedroom. “Is that true, Valera?”

He looks at Valery over his shoulder in the same way a snake might look at its prey. Sideways, suspicious. None too happy. And yet, somehow, ever so slightly pleased.

It takes Valery a moment to answer and when he does all he can say is, “Yes, well...come and sit.”

His apartment has a drawing room, with comfortable arm chairs and wooden tables. It’s a useful little room with an unfortunate singular flaw: no windows. As a compromise, Valery has covered the room in lamps which come in a mix of lampshade colors and bulb wattages. Boris follows his lead and helps to turn several on.

“Have the doctors told you anything?” he asks, settling in, opening his briefcase. He won’t look Valery in the eye in a way that is reminiscent of everyone else in this city and is just slightly upsetting.

“Only to take iodine.” Valery clears his throat. More has been said than that to him by more than one doctor, but he’s reticent to share. Not with Boris in particular, just with anyone. Death feels personal to him now in a way it didn’t a year ago.

“Fucking iodine.” The briefcase is full of papers, a yellow paged, tightly lined notebook and a fountain pen which is engraved with Boris’ name. Valery wonders who got it for him. “If that was the cure for cancer you’d think we would know about it by now.”

Valery makes a noise of assent, a hum in the back of his throat. “I am...sorry,” he says, when the silence between them has become too much to handle. “I should have asked before I told Khomyuk you would take the lead in the testimony.”

“I’m used to taking the lead, Valera.” Boris still won’t meet his eyes. It’s starting to feel pointed. “But like I said on the phone, if I’m talking about something that doesn’t come naturally to me, I’ll need to rehearse.”

“Of course. We can do that.” Valery knows he’s staring at Boris’ hands, but he can’t stop himself. “You’re a fast learner, we can easily—”

“Who’s this?”

Valery is surprised by the interruption and he ends up blinking at Sasha rubbing against Boris’ legs for several full seconds. The cat is looking up at Boris with naked interest, not in the least intimidated.

“That would be Sasha.” Valery is on his feet before he even has time to think about it. “She’ll be expecting dinner now. If that’s alright?”

He watches, fascinated, as Boris allows her to rub her face against his knuckles.

“Not at all,” he says, and Valery remembers as he spoons what’s left of last night’s leftovers into her bowl how Boris had once fed stray dogs on the streets of Pripyat. He’d found himself charmed by the action at the time, disarmed by the unselfish kindness of it.

“They haven’t bugged my apartment,” he says when he returns to the drawing room, not moving to sit down, “in case you were wondering.”

Boris, pen to paper, stares at him as if he’s an idiot. “Oh?”

“You once told me you were a party man, Boris. As if I wasn’t.” Valery takes his glasses off and rubs at his eyes, glad for the wall at his back. “That’s the beauty of this machine, isn’t it? When they think part of it is working as intended, they trust it to continue that way right up until the whole thing collapses in on itself.”

“And if they are listening?” Boris looks unconvinced by the metaphor, though he already seems less tense. He holds most of his tension in his shoulders, Valery has noticed. “If you’re wrong?”

“I’d be dead by now if that were the case and, anyway,” Valery says, thinking of his last conversation with Khomyuk and hoping he sounds more confident than he is, “after Vienna it wouldn’t suit them for me to disappear. They need me alive.”

“For now,” Boris agrees, and they leave it at that.

Valery brings the vodka out halfway through the night and allows himself to drink to the point that he only laughs when he spills some on the blueprints of reactor three. He knows he’ll be dismayed in the morning, but it hardly seems to matter right now.

Boris leans back from his chair, cigarette in hand and smoke pouring from his mouth as he says, “Tell me, how much were you taking from the hotel bar? Because I distinctly remember the shelves being stocked when we arrived, and that wasn’t the case by the end.”

“Oh, let’s see. I don’t remember how much was there to begin with—but I was taking a bottle of this or that every few days, right up until it ran out.” Valery is comfortably drunk and only has enough left for one shot in front of him right now, so he finds the prospect of not splitting it between the two of them appalling. “Did you take any?”

“Only what you offered me.” Boris takes the half-full shot glass from Valery with the hint of a smile on his face. “The rest of it, I ordered in. It was about the only thing I got delivered to us that I didn’t have to yell at someone for.”

The memory of Boris yelling into phones on his behalf makes Valery feel oddly woozy and escaping to the kitchen for a moment seems like the best solution. Once there, he discovers that the sunlight isn’t streaming in through the windows any longer and he remembers with a start that he doesn’t like nights.

“Boris?” he calls, falling into one of the chairs around the kitchen table and looking out the window at the darkened sky, the rooftops and cut-out shapes in the far away distance. The city framed like a postage stamp, Moscow as he imagined it when he was young and living in the south.

He turns to see Boris in the doorway, filling up most of it with his broad shoulders, a reassuring sight.

“It’s dark outside,” Valery tells him, uselessly.

Boris doesn’t say anything, just moves towards him, sits across from him, and snubs his own cigarette out alongside the wilted one Valery left there hours ago. He looks at Valery in a way that makes Valery’s insides squirm, that makes his mind race for the right word.

 _Fond_. There it is. Boris looks at him fondly, and it takes him a moment to realize his hands are shaking and another to realize his eyes are wet.

“Oh, Valera,” Boris says, and he’s said it a thousand times before but that _name_. Valery can’t remember the last time anyone else called him such a thing, in such a way. “What are we going to do with you?”

“Stay,” Valery answers, though it isn’t a perfect fit for the question. “Would you? Just...stay. A few more hours, or-or the night. I’ve been, I’ve felt _alone_.”

“Since Chernobyl,” Boris says, still guarded against Valery doesn’t know what.

Or worse, and more truthfully, he _does_. He knows exactly what, and the truth of it makes his whole body ache for keeping his hands where they are, folded in front of him.

“No.” He shakes his head and feels his nails bite into skin, but he refuses to come any closer to crying. Not in front of this man.  “No, since before then. Long before.”

There is a silence and Valery keeps his gaze trained on Boris’ hands, on the way they mirror his own. Neither of them reaching out. With this thing between them that they cannot see, and both of them well aware, perhaps more than anyone, how dangerous the invisible can be.

“As late as it is,” Boris says, “I may as well.”

And when Valery looks him in the eye, he doesn’t look away.

—

A week passes, and Boris doesn’t leave.

More accurately, he leaves once and returns with a leather suitcase and without his wedding band on. Valery doesn’t ask him about it, only continues chopping onions in the kitchen and announces he’s making a stew of leftovers, and that there’s a pie in the fridge from the widow who lives across the hall and has no idea who he is.

“Why does that matter?” Boris asks, loosening his tie in a fashion that makes Valery fleetingly imagine a world where he could get used to such things.

“Because if she knew who I was,” Valery says as he uses his knife to slide the onions from the cutting board and into the pot, “she would never give me a pie.”

“I know who you are, and I would give you a pie.”

His gaze trained downward at the boiling water, Valery can’t help the smile that nudges at the corners of his mouth. “I shudder to imagine a pie made by you.”

He’s done the cooking the past week, and Boris has done the dishes and gone out and bought more vodka. He’s gone back and forth to his office and brought back stories that have nothing to do with the documents they pour over in the evening hours, stories that he laughs as he retells, or pounds at the table in anger over.

The loudness of it has served to remind Valery how strange and empty his life has been up until now.

He hasn’t been back to work at Kurchatov in over a month, not since he was in the hospital, something which Boris asks him about over dinner one night, leftover stew and rye bread, with Sasha meowing under the table.

“It was an accident, some broken glass that I wasn’t careful enough with.” Valery leans to the side to drop scraps on the floor for the cat. He’s aware that he’s not a very good liar.

“If an accident like that were to happen again, I hope you’d let me know.”

It may be the nicest thing Boris has ever said to him, and it makes Valery tense up as a result. He feels as if he’s on the very edge of the world, looking over at some great abyss. He doesn’t reply, just pushes his chair back and heads to the sink, starting to wash out his bowl.

“Valera?”

His spoon clatters against the metal of the sink and he turns to find Boris looking at him, concerned, which only makes him angrier.

“For fuck’s sake, you don’t need to coddle me. I’m not your _wife_ , Boris.”

Boris just looks at him, rather unimpressed. “Believe me, I’m well aware of that.”

“Then what are you doing _here_? Go back to her!” The anger in him is like water off his back, already almost gone. He can never hold onto it long, and he feels exhausted now, all his energy expended on a few simple outbursts.

“She asked me to leave,” Boris admits, rapping his bare knuckles against the top of the kitchen table. “The timing worked out well. She says I am...a different person.”

Feeling cowed, Valery sinks against the counter, pushing his glasses up and rubbing at the bridge of his nose with a sigh. “If I was married, I imagine my wife would have said the same thing when I came back home.”

“Hm. You, married.” Boris seems to marvel at the concept and Valery feels hollowed out by the way his eyes roam over him. “Can’t imagine it.”

“Of course you can’t. Give me that.” Valery clears the table, not even bothering to ask if it’s alright. He wants to get his self-imposed punishment of doing the dishes over with, to start drinking and forget all of this. “I’m surprised you’ve never brought it up before.”

He doesn’t have to look at Boris to know he’s shrugging, nor to know he’s leaning down to pick up Sasha. “I’ve seen what they have on you and it’s...not much. You were discreet, as a youth. And as far as indiscretions go, who someone chooses to warm their bed has never been something I’ve been interested in holding against people.”

Valery pauses, staring down at his hands under steaming hot water, his skin beginning to pink before he feels able to move again. “So you believe me, then? That the apartment isn’t bugged.”

“It took two days for them to get someone to tail me here after work,” Boris says, easy as that. “They would have known where to find me if they were listening in.”

“Ah.” Valery towels off his hands and goes to grab the shot glasses they use while pouring over blueprints in the drawing room from the top shelf. “Well, the night won’t wait for us. If you’re ready.”

As always, Boris is.

—

“There was a woman once,” Valery says, one golden afternoon when he’s stopped trying to hide the fading scar on his wrist. “A woman I thought I would marry.”

The sound of Boris’ fountain pen against paper slows and then stops and then picks up again. “Is that so?”

“Yes. Kateryna. She was sweet to me and we were young, and I thought that was enough.” Valery runs a finger over the outline of a control rod, surprised as he always is that the blue ink doesn’t smear across the paper. “She ended things over a holiday. It was the first time I realized that a smile could be sad.”

“You broke her heart.” Boris’ voice is quiet considering the source, the words subdued in the faded lamplight. He keeps disappearing to the bathroom, as if Valery won’t hear him coughing in there.

“Not in the way you’re thinking. No, I think she knew.”

Sasha is sat looking at them from a perch on top of one of the bookcases, eyes lazy and warm. Valery knows it’s only a matter of time before she hops down and looks for one of them to scratch behind her ears. She has never been shy about asking for affection, unlike him.

“And after her? There were others?”

Valery glances at Boris, who has set down his pen and actually seems interested, which strikes Valery as a first. This isn’t something he talks about, not to anyone, but then he and Boris have discussed a great many things he never thought he would.

He shuffles the papers in front of him around and nods. “Men, after that. Never for long. Just a meeting here or there in an inconspicuous place. At first, I was the nervous one, and then after a while I became the one who knew what to do.”

His gaze meets Boris’ for half a second before he looks away. His mouth is dry and his head is spinning and they haven’t even begun drinking yet.

“Your wife,” he says, “How...how is she?”

“Oh.” Boris taps his pen against his knee and Valery does his utmost not to think about the broadness of his palms or the length of his legs. “I’d imagine you and Kateryna had more love between you than my wife and I, Valera.”

“Is that—”

“How long has it been?”

“I...pardon?”

Boris spreads his legs farther apart and Valery feels faint. “Since you were with another man.”

“Fuck, that’s...I don’t know. Years.” Valery swallows and it’s painful, his throat tight and dry. “It was after I got my doctorate, but not long after. I couldn’t even tell you his name.”

For a moment, the words hang in the air, and Valery dares to let himself think the invisible thing between them will rise up and make itself known. He allows himself to imagine it for a second, feeling the way a burst dam must as the thoughts roil inside of him, making him physically hot.

He has to steady himself where he sits at the very idea of slotting in between Boris’ knees, of the surety that he would fit there in a way he has nowhere else in such a long time.

Then Boris leans over and taps the end of his pen against the document that recounts each button press inside the control room and says, “Could you hand me that,” and it all dissipates in an instant.

Valery does as he’s asked and returns to work, but he’s never able to build the wall back up again.

In all honesty, he doesn’t even try.

—

It isn’t, Valery tells himself before bed, a sexual thing.

This is a mantra he’s gotten used to over the years. Before Boris, it was a story he told himself about Illya in billing, and before that it was something he repeated to himself about the man who smiled at him at the newspaper stand one Sunday.

Wanting to be with someone, to touch them even, isn’t a sexual thing. He is lonely here and it’s only natural to crave some kind of contact, a meaningful relationship and all that entails.

He and Boris talk until time turns in on itself like the circle it is, until night becomes morning, and Valery tells himself this is normal. Completely, utterly normal.

When he wakes, his head is aching and his cock is hard against his leg and he groans into his pillow. He feels defeated as he reaches down to touch himself and then ashamed when all it takes to goad himself to release is imagining what the press of Boris’ palm to his elbow might feel like.

He spends the afternoon cleaning and fields a call from Kurchatov, a well-meaning, younger researcher who wants his opinion on a project, and whom Valery ends up talking to for an hour.

Boris arrives home halfway through the call and Valery waves him away, cigarette smoke in the air between them as he says, “No, no, I’m listening. I just think it’s important you have a goal. Research for the sake of research is nothing of the sort. You have to ask yourself, what are you hoping to _accomplish_?”

By the time the call is over, there’s a not altogether horrible smell emanating from the kitchen and Valery stands blinking at the head of the kitchen table.

“Well,” Boris says, gesturing at the seat across from him, “ _sit_.”

He’s made beef solyanka, with enough spice that Valery coughs after his first spoonful, but it’s not bad.

“My mother’s recipe.” Boris looks pleased with himself, which annoys Valery in a comforting sort of way. Boris’ smugness at his smallest of accomplishments around the house is oddly charming, and he doesn’t like how easily he feels won over by one pot’s worth of soup. “She used to make it for us when we weren’t feeling well.”

“So that you’d die and save her the trouble?”

“Maybe. Or maybe that’s why I made it for you.”

Sasha is sat at attention on the floor, watching them like they’re a tennis match, waiting to see which one of them will waver first. Valery throws her some broth soaked bits of bread and promises to feed her properly once the dishes are done, and she gives him a look that says she doesn’t believe him.

As they’re finishing up, Valery gathers the bowls and doesn’t bother to watch for Boris to get up and head to the drawing room, which is perhaps why it surprises him when he looks up and sees the other man still sitting at the table.

“Enjoying the view?” he asks, before he can think better of it and biting at the inside of his cheek right after.

“Of you, Valera? Always.”

It’s an oddly sincere answer and it sits in the pit of Valery’s stomach through the next hour and a half, through two rounds of shots and half a drinking song that Boris is making up as they go along.

He loses his lighter at some point and has Boris light a cigarette for him, leaning in to catch the flame and blowing smoke towards the ceiling. They’re sitting on the floor like children, an ashtray between them.

“When was the last time we actually talked about the reactor?” he says, not bothering to look away from Boris like he might have were he asking the question sober.

“Last Thursday, if my memory serves.” Boris hardly seems bothered by this. “You were talking about coefficients and I...needed a break. You needed a break.”

“Mm.” Valery considers this, taking a deep drag and exhaling slowly in an attempt to calm his heartbeat. “You know, we could have talked things out over the phone. Planned your testimony easily that way. But you came over.”

“Yes. I did.” Boris speaks so slowly it’s almost painful. Valery has always preferred, in situations like this, to be shot down efficiently, quickly. So fast and painless he won’t even know he’s dead. “Then, if I recall, you asked me to stay.”

“I did,” Valery echoes, flicking ash off the end of his cigarette. “But no one’s keeping you here, Boris. You have other friends, I’m sure.”

For a moment, Boris is silent, and then he pushes the ashtray towards Valery.

“I do have other friends,” he says, “but none of them are like you, Valera. Put out your cigarette and come here.”

Valery does as he’s told, and leans in.

—

The kiss is a deceitful thing, soft and slow and trembling with want underneath it all. It’s not enough.

The two of them on the drawing room floor, Valery out of breath and Boris holding back.

“Don’t,” Valery says, hands shaking and always fighting against some part of him that says this is a trick. It can’t be what he wants it to be, because that would be too _good_. He has never known anything to be good without some kind of a catch. “Don’t hold out on me. I can take that from a lot of people. But not from you.”

Those words, between them, act like a lit match thrown onto gasoline.

The resulting contact isn’t pretty and Valery can’t pick one reason to explain why. Part of it, he knows, is his own lack of technique after all these years, and another part of it is Boris’ general disregard for finesse. There’s the alcohol of course, and the knife-edge sharpness inherent to the sudden nature of it all.

Reason aside, the simple fact is that they come together like two atoms colliding might, and that thought makes Valery wonder if this has always been inescapable.

Valery opens his mouth and Boris takes what’s his and it's inelegant and imperfect and, most of all, _theirs_.

That’s what Valery tells himself as Boris bites at his bottom lip and as he pushes Boris onto his back, straddling his lap and taking a second to breathe. _Theirs_. It’s not without some regret. They had hotel rooms down the hall from each other for the better part of a year and Valery gladly would have done this then if he’d known it was an option.

Now it feels like the clock is ticking.

He licks a stripe up the side of Boris’ neck and Boris laughs at that, saying, with a tone of amazement, “Never took you for the type.”

“The type?” Valery speaks the words against his skin and reaches down to palm Boris’ erection, refusing to allow himself to doubt it’s there. The hardness of it against his palm, with only clothing between them, makes his breath hitch in his throat.

“I just thought— _Jesus_ , Valera. I imagined you would be...shy.”

“Oh.” Valery is stupidly pleased at that turn of phrase. He imagined. Valery has been pushing away any thoughts of the kind for much longer than he’d like to admit, and here Boris has been. Imagining. “Shy? Not with you. Remind me of how long we’ve been together.”

Boris’ brow furrows and Valery moves forward just enough so that their cocks, hard and clothed, brush against one another.

“Fuck.” Boris is the one out of breath now, out of his element.

“How long?” Valery prompts him again.

“A year—over a year. Since we met. Would you _just_ —”

Valery, feeling satisfied, uses one hand to keep himself propped up and another to undo Boris’ fly, and from there it’s a quick thing. The movement of hips and hands and the feeling of carpet beneath them. Valery falls to his side in the rush and is too winded to get up again. He pushes his own pants down his legs and then allows himself to move without putting much thought into it.

His leg thrown over Boris’ thigh, a hand on Boris’ upper arm, and they’re pressed together.

“Take me in your hand,” he says, barely realizing the words are coming out of his own mouth as he shudders under the touch of this man, the only person in the world who knows what he wants and is willing to give it to him. “Like that, _yes_ and then—and then—”

“I have an idea of how this goes, Valera,” Boris says, voice shot and pupils blown, and Valery thinks _oh, so this is what it is, to be adored_.

His glasses are pushed to the side and the whole world goes blurry as Boris takes his cock in hand and holds it like he would his own for one breathtaking moment before his hand starts to move.

Valery is unraveling in seconds, his face burning and his cock already leaking precum. The room is sweltering, unbearably hot and claustrophobic, and yet he never wants to leave its confines. With that thought, he comes so hard he’s shaking and apologizing, worried about stains on Boris’ jacket sleeve.

The best way to apologize is to get his mouth around Boris’ cock, he thinks, and he does just that, hazy and grappling for purchase at the backs of Boris’ thighs.

It comes back to him faster than he would have expected, how to do this and how to do it well. His tongue on the underside, tracing the vein there, the head at the back of his throat and Boris saying his name over and over again somewhere up above it all.

When Boris’ hand slips into his hair, that’s when he knows he can’t stop, and the pace he sets for himself is relentless, a punishment for he doesn’t know what.

Maybe just for waiting this long.

When Boris comes down his throat it’s with a shout and with his hand gripping at Valery’s hair and Valery ends up plastered against his thigh, panting and with cum at the corner of his mouth.

The room is spinning and his mouth is dry, but neither of them move for minutes that stretch on longer than they rightly should. Valery is placated by Boris’ hand stroking his hair over and over again, the movement grounding him in an otherwise surreal moment of his life.

“Valera,” Boris finally says, voice cracked and dry, “I think it’s time for bed.”

He’s right, and it’s the first time he doesn’t sleep in the spare bedroom.

But it’s not the last.

—

The room they lead him to after the trial is dizzying and Valery feels like his head is going to explode as he listens to the consequences of his actions.

He’s numb by the time they ask him about Boris, and his answer is true. It had never seemed pertinent to tell Boris what he was thinking of doing, not when he’d been so sure, right up until the end, that he wouldn’t go through with it.

His ears are ringing as he’s informed he won’t be allowed contact with Boris or with Khomyuk, two blows dealt in quick succession. The only scientist who cares to hear his opinion anymore right alongside the only man he’s ever spent more than one night with.

Everything else he could handle, he’s relatively sure. He’s been absent from Kurchatov for months now and he didn’t become a scientist to win awards or honors.

But the loneliness, he doesn’t know if he can survive that—and that’s what he’s thinking of as they lead him out to the car.

As he looks across the way and makes eye contact with Boris one last time.

They’re halfway to Moscow before he thinks to ask if they’re taking him home, and it turns out they are—but only for a moment. He’s getting relocated to a significantly smaller apartment on the other side of town and he has just a few moments to gather up what he wants to take with him.

It’s a surprisingly easy task. He has a carrier for Sasha and a pocket watch from his father, some select articles of clothing along with a few books he never gets tired of and a tape recorder he plans on using. He returns to the drawing room and takes special care packing away a fountain pen and a yellow paged, tightly lined notebook filled with neat handwriting.

In her cage, Sasha is mewling nervously, and Valery speaks to her as he picks her up and they head out the door.

“It’s going to be okay,” he says, as the door falls shut behind them, “I won’t be leaving you any time soon.”

**Author's Note:**

> i do apologize for the downer ending, but i wanted to try for something that could exist within the world the show created for these two. i like to think boris ends up with sasha somehow, in the end.


End file.
